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What Hurricane Sandy Can Teach Us About Ending Homelessness

It has been three weeks now since hurricane Sandy barreled into the Atlantic coast, and though most of the TV cameras have long left, the volunteers and community organizations that mobilized immediately after are still here – serving hot meals, distributing supplies, and cleaning out the flooded basements of complete strangers. Like after most natural disasters, it’s a remarkable display of human solidarity and empathy for the estimated 40,000 left homeless, many of whom are still camping out in hotels, in shelters or with friends.

The question is: Why don’t we bring that same urgency to the way we respond to the nearly 50,000 New Yorkers (not to mention untold others across the U.S.) who before the hurricane were crowding the municipal shelter system each night? We would never say “tough luck” to the family on Staten Island whose house was irreparably damaged by the storm. Yet aren’t we saying just that to those left homeless by less public disasters when we offer shelters – not stable homes – and stop short of real solutions?

You might say that natural disasters are different because they’re outside of anyone’s control. But people often lose their homes a result of other overwhelming catastrophes – sudden unemployment, health problems, family breakdowns, or difficult transitions from foster care or from the military. These events are experienced much like small, hyper-localized hurricanes that can turn a life upside down. Once a home is lost, getting back on track is exceedingly difficult, especially in places like New York City with its low vacancy rates and high rents. And there are grave consequences for communities, not just the homeless, when the problem remains unsolved. Studies have shown that we spend far more public dollars on shelters, hospitals and other institutions providing short-term aid to the homeless than would be required to help end homelessness in the first place.

But what exactly would ending homelessness look like? Enter Ashoka Fellow Rosanne Haggerty, who has spent her career addressing this very question. Rosanne is the founder and director of Community Solutions, a NY-based not-for-profit that works nationally to end homelessness by strengthening communities. She is proving that it’s well within the means of communities to reduce homelessness dramatically – but it requires the kind of focus and cooperative energy that natural disasters (usually) bring.

Rosanne Haggerty speaking to Red Hook, Brooklyn residents post-Sandy.

It starts with data. Rosanne and her team support communities in identifying those in need by name, prioritizing the most vulnerable people based on health and other factors, and creating organized systems for quickly matching the homeless with housing that is appropriate to the household’s size, budget and special needs. Rosanne describes the process as “clarifying the demand and organizing the supply.”

In many communities the distribution of government-assisted housing is a free-for-all – depending more on chance rather than operating as an orderly marketplace. Rosanne points to the frequency with which those with known risks of homelessness are left to their own devices to find housing and often don’t, including those discharged from foster care, wounded warriors transitioning from the military, or those who were on the street before they were hospitalized.

For years Rosanne has led efforts to increase the availability of affordable housing, but Community Solutions has found it can be even more effective by helping communities change the way they organize the resources that touch the lives of vulnerable people. For example, their 100,000 Homes Campaign was launched to support change agents in communities throughout the country to move the homeless into stable homes rather than shelters. With more than 170 communities now involved, they are on track to house 100,000 of the most vulnerable homeless in the country by July, 2014.

Rosanne and her team have designed a solution rooted in collaboration (which, as David Bornstein so eloquently noted last week, is a characteristic of many social entrepreneurs). She’s a reminder that when it comes to solving complex social problems – just as when responding to a natural disaster – you need more than goodwill alone, and more than a set of programs operating in isolation. Data, systems alignment, matching supply with demand, communication – they are as relevant for addressing homelessness as they are for any problem. And when you integrate them with the resources you already have at hand, what seemed like an insurmountable problem starts looking different.

Rosanne Haggerty, who leads a multi-disciplinary team of professionals at Community Solutions, is an internationally recognized leader in the arena of resolving homelessness. She founded Common Ground in 1990, and presided over its growth into one of the largest developers of permanent supportive housing in the country for more than 20 years until leaving to launch Community Solutions in 2011 with a new national strategy. Rosanne is an Ashoka Senior Fellow, a Hunt Alternatives Fund Prime Mover, and a 2001 recipient of a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Genius Fellowship.

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